Edgar Cayce grew up on a farm in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, in 1877 talking to his dead grandfather's spirit and memorizing books by sleeping on them, oddities that later became a career. For more than forty years he lay on a couch, closed his eyes, folded his hands over his stomach, and answered questions in an unconscious state, from how to treat arthritis to how the pyramids were built. The film traces that career through the roughly 14,306 recorded readings, organized loosely around health remedies, reincarnation, dream interpretation, psychic phenomena, and meditation and prayer. It follows the founding of his Association for Research and Enlightenment in Virginia Beach in 1931, still open today with the readings archived in its library, and touches on Thomas Sugrue's 1942 biography There Is a River. Cayce died in 1945, and the film's case for his importance rests on how many now-ordinary terms, auras, soul mates, holistic health, trace back to a farmer's son who claimed no memory of what he said while asleep.